Novel
Bound to Violence
Le Devoir de violence
Yambo Ouologuem · 1968
Synopsis
In the imaginary empire of Nakem, in the Sahel, the Saïf dynasty rules from century to century through war, terror and the slave trade, long before the arrival of the Europeans and then under French colonisation. In the second part, Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi, son of Tambira and Kassoumi, slaves of the Saïf, succeeds at the colonial school; he is sent to study in France, where he trains as an architect.
Context
The novel appeared from Seuil in 1968. Passages taken from a novel by Graham Greene and from André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des Justes were soon found in it; the author claims that his quotation marks disappeared at publication, but Seuil withdrew the book from sale in 1971. Ralph Manheim translated it into English the same year. Le Serpent à plumes reissued it in the early two thousands, with a preface by Christopher Wise, and Seuil took it up again in 2018. It feeds into the novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, crowned with the Goncourt in 2021.
Who it is for
A brief, dense novel in French, written as a counter-epic, of constant violence.
Prizes and reception
Prix Renaudot 1968, the first awarded to an African writer; a Malian literary prize has borne the author's name since 2008.